As you may have noticed, the price of stamps went up last week by an entire penny. Overall, the nation seems to be coping pretty well, unless they’re small businesses who have a lot of overseas customers. (Air mail prices went up, too. A lot.) One entity that isn’t coping well is reader Layla’s apartment complex. They’ve raised everyone’s rent one penny to compensate for the postage change, and chose to notify everyone by… delivering a letter to their doors.

She writes:

I’m a resident of [redacted], Maryland, and yesterday I found the attached letter at my door. In short, to compensate for the recent $.01 increase in stamp prices, our rent will be increasing $.01 to cover the cost of mailing the bill. I have no idea if such spontaneous rent increases are even legal (all the information on rent increases I can find is on increases when renewing a lease, which is not the case here) or where to log a complaint, if they are not.

I also seriously wonder how it is even cost effective to take the time to write, print, and deliver letters in order to collect 1 cent extra, per month. To the best of my knowledge, they do not offer leases longer than 12 months, so the maximum benefit is 11 cents. The average benefit has to be significantly lower.

At least they didn’t use 46-cent stamp on every one of the letters. Depending on the layout of the complex, though, it might have cost even more in the long run to send someone around to deliver them.

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